


I Kept It From You

by nolaespoir



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, M/M, New Orleans, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 12:33:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6079500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolaespoir/pseuds/nolaespoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Eames trusts you, yeah? Because he's going to need to trust you on this one, Arthur."</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Kept It From You

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of hand-wavy science and dreamsharing. Un-beta'd, so please forgive.

There was a phone call, to start.

It was barely morning in Los Angeles, just on the right side of dawn and cool enough that Arthur was standing in his kitchen in the socks he’d worn to bed, waiting for his coffee to brew, when his cell phone vibrated against the hard title counter and ruined his ritual, pre-dawn lethargy.

Arthur’s brain came awake, startled by the noise and the muscle memory it cued, his shoulders tensing, the quick flood of adrenaline through his still tired body. Because old habits die hard.

The screen showed a string of unfamiliar numbers—something foreign but he couldn’t place the country code—and his thumb hovered for a long moment. It wasn’t an infrequent thing, once—calls at all hours from burner phones purchased at junk shops half-way across the world—but it had become so. He’d let it become so. Age was finally catching up to Arthur, and experience, and he was choosier now about the jobs he took. He’d become harder to find. Exhaustion had made a vacation home of his body, and an ache in his right knee had followed him out of dreams. It bothered him on cold mornings in far away cities.

He answered.

“Darling,” the voice at the other end purred, cut through with static. “Darling, there’s this job…”

Arthur had never learned to say no to Eames.

He set his phone back down and took his coffee out onto the back porch and sat overlooking the canal, watching the sky blush and ripen, silhouetting a tangle of palm trees and power lines in the near distance. The coffee was bitter—he’d let it brew maybe two minutes too long—but Arthur drank it down just the same. It was hot, which counted for a lot. A garbage truck grumbled from an alleyway a few blocks down, and his neighbor set a record to play, quiet and scratchy, while she started on breakfast. It was Buddy Holly today, with buttermilk pancakes perhaps. 

Arthur tried to remember how Eames had looked, the last time Arthur saw him.

No job, no reason for their schedules to overlap. It’d be luck, pure and dumb, which Arthur didn’t even believe in but—he didn’t know another word for it. Serendipity was too sweet; he trusted coincidence less than luck. But there they were, two sometimes colleagues, sometimes strangers, passing one another in a hotel bar. Arthur: dressed down with nowhere to go, wasting time before a re-scheduled flight; and Eames: wrangled into a neat suit, escorting a woman with a few graceful years on him to the elevator bank. She had smiled at Eames as prettily as any young thing in love could, Arthur remembered.

Eames’s hair had been shorter, jagged; his body more compact. His lips, as ever, unfairly pursed, the edges dusted over with the stubbly beginnings of his bramble-like beard. The fit of the suit spoke to the attention of a good tailor.

No words. They were a dozen feet apart, and the moment passed so quickly, and what would they even had said? But their eyes met, locked for one long, precious second, each acknowledging the other. A fleeting look hiding the permeance of something more, something deeper.

It must’ve been a year ago. Maybe more.

It was unfair, how it still ached, how some bit of him _always_ ached when his thoughts turned to Eames. Arthur drank down the sludgy dredges of his coffee. He wanted to lob the empty mug into the canal, put some force into it, some frustration, but he couldn’t. His mother had bought it for him. She asked to use it whenever she came to visit.

Arthur had gone into semi-retirement running from this feeling, the gross heaviness of everything that was unacknowledged between him and Eames. A whole lifetime of it. He’d been so good, for so long, at ignoring it; but he was getting old at last, and lonely, and seeing Eames now felt like his knee on a bad day—like some stubborn ache that had followed him out of a dream once.

Of course it was unfair how he still ran when Eames called.

But Arthur had been the best, once upon a time. Maybe he still was. And didn’t Eames deserve the best?

 

The extractor had a reputation.

It took all sorts, even in dreamshare, and certainly Arthur could appreciate a reputation (he had more than a few himself: he was precise, he was demanding, he was a fine, sharp piece of American military craftsmanship. He was, in a word, an ass; but an efficient, effective ass). He could appreciate a reputation, but he considered his particular tastes refined, elegant. Old school, maybe. Arthur liked the rule book (that was another reputation).

Eames could appreciate a reputation, too. His tastes, however, veered toward invention, toward creatives with wide eyes and wider imaginations, who thought themselves wild and mad and brilliant for attempting ten different things Arthur himself had considered and dismissed before breakfast. Their roman candle ideas failed most of the time, but they gave themselves points for trying.

Sometimes, though, one would strike on something, strike oil, and they’d become reputation rich. Just for a while, just long enough to get someone killed (themselves, if the rest of them were lucky). Arthur had seen them come, seen them go; so had Eames. Their wells were shallow, dried up quickly (kids these days); and when it did, they were just what they’d always been: young, stupid (it so looked like bravery, to start), desperate.

It was a risk, then, to get too close, skirting the blast radius.

Eames liked games of risk. Always had done. Arthur knew this plenty well.

It kept him young, he thought, or it at least it kept him sharp. Keeping his toes in the water, in the kiddie pool, seeing who came up and from where and how. The how was important. Seeing what they left in their wake as they climbed was important, too. Eames kept his eyes on the lot of them, every reverent whisper, every tall tale swirling through dreamshare with the same new name at its center, picking up dust and debris and a body count.

After all, what could he really learn from people who already knew exactly what they were doing?

Eames was the best for a reason.

Arthur was the best, too; he was good—Eames would never say differently. But he wasn’t useful, not in that way. Not to Eames, who liked a challenge, liked a little imagination, roughly hewn as it might be.

It had taken time—too much time, honestly; it had taken _years_ —but Arthur had come to terms with this simple, stupid reality:

He was not Eames’s _type_.

Arthur lacked ingenuity, inventiveness. He lacked playfulness. He lacked, he lacked, _he lacked_ all of the essential, unnamable things that lured Eames in, caught his keen, distractible puppy eye, made him salivate and wiggle about in excitement. Arthur was boring. Eames longed to be fascinated, longed to skirt the very edges of the world, court its every danger, see old orders razed to their very basements by the frightfully confident swagger of youth. Eames, who was as malleable in life as he was in dreams, had kept himself young by burrowing in with folk like this, like Smith.

The extractor called himself Smith, anyway, and spoke with Silicon Valley-like bravado and a romantic lilt. He was practically a child, Arthur thought, just shy of lanky, his milky dark skin unmarred, unscarred, a hopeful canvas. His eyes were bright when he welcomed them, welcomed Eames especially, and Arthur thought not for the first time that Eames was probably half in love with this Smith. How he had spoken of him during that first phone call, with a far away tone that was close to reference, had started Arthur on the assumption; how he held onto his hand a beat too long in greeting cemented it. Smith looked at Eames as thought he wanted to consume him, and Eames looked back at him like exactly that was on offer.

There had been whispers of this kid for a while now. That’s what Eames had told him. He was overly brilliant, a jack-of-all-trades. On some jobs he built, on others he mixed; and now here he was, extracting, had been for six months. (He’d probably played half a dozen sports when he was a boy, Arthur thought, and two instruments, spoken three languages—he had that look about him, of a life curated for the Ivy League.)

People said Smith could incept marks easier than most people could assemble an Ikea desk.

Arthur hadn’t been paying attention to the birthing pains of the second generation of dreamsharers, not like Eames had. Arthur felt practically retired these days, his list of known associates dying off—either on paper or worse—and it hadn’t seemed important. Now it did. Now Arthur cared. Now Arthur wanted to know who was behind the whispers and what was left of them.

Arthur didn’t trust being rounded up like a specimen for study, in case Smith decided he wanted to try his hand at running point, next.

But Arthur trusted Eames.

He trusted him and he missed him, and he’d taken the job, so he’d see it through.

 

The team was in New Orleans working out of a suite at the Hotel Monteleone, with its dim and chipped gilt finishes and musty florals, the muted noise of the French Quarter near and far below. It was February and the whole city smelled of sweat and spilled beer.

Arthur had been here before, knew the music and manic pulse of the city during Mardi Gras, knew its traps and teases and a few good tales. He wanted to say as much to Eames, invite him downstairs to the Carousel Bar after the briefing, tell him about it over sazeracs, take him out onto the streets after the sun had gone down in search of fried shrimp poboys and daiquiris in to-go cups, their feet crunching through puddles of chump beads and glitter. (Arthur had been very young, the last time he’d been in the city.)

But his throat seized up when he saw Eames, and it felt wrong, too familiar, to say any of those things. They didn’t do that, they weren’t _that_ to each other, and anything else he might say would feel like small talk or shop talk, pointless. (He’s gone too long without talking to Eames and now he didn’t know how.)

So Arthur gave Eames a respect nod when he walked in and claimed the chair at the desk, pulling out his Moleskin to spread it against his knee, at attention. Eames sat on the couch beside a withered, ghostly wisp of a girl, purple-haired and severe—their chemist, Sylvie. Isaac, the architect, somewhat diminutive and overly round, stood in the corner, propped lazily against the wall. Arthur had tried to do his homework, but these were _kids_. They barely had track records.

Smith began.

It was small time, the job (to Arthur, to Eames); a local matter, really. Old money, old lineages, reputations and titles and a whole lot of grandstanding. This was Mardi Gras, after all. The big krewes rolled in a week and some fathers would do anything to put a crown on their daughter’s head. There was something pleasant in how antiquated it all felt—monarchies and consorts, grand and elaborate balls.

Inception was what they were after. Smith waited a beat, expecting a reaction, the sharp intake of breath the youngest on the team fulfilled. Arthur and Eames stared on, unfazed. Smith almost faltered, but continued.

“The problem with inception—the reason everyone has always failed at it, I’ve realized—is they go too deep.”

Arthur glanced at Eames, wanting to share a look, but Eames kept his eyes on Smith.

“It’s not about depth at all,” he said, and Eames almost smirked, his face bright with a look of _now you’ve got it,_ like Smith really was the brightest kid in class.

Smith went on to explain his method, with well-timed smirks and gesticulation, clearing believing his own brilliance. It came down the compound, he said. A derivative of Somnacin him and a buddy had come up with when they were students at Imperial, in London. Somnacin worked by synchronizing various neural pathways in the cerebral cortex, mimicking the patterns of neural firings and stitching them together like a map, projected onto each subject, tying them to each other. Smith’s compound went a step further—a complement to Somnacin, he called it, affecting the sympathetic nervous system. It not only matched and cross-distributed the visuals of a dream; it mimicked emotional responses.

Smith gestured to Eames, his face alight. The cat that got the cream.

“Eames is our forger,” he said. “But this won’t be your run-of-the-mill forgery. It won’t be a matter of rearranging your face, your body—wearing someone else like a piece of fine clothing. This is… this is _acting._ In your bones, Strasberg-esque Method acting. With this compound we can synthesize emotions. Anything Eames feels, the mark will feel. And if the dream feels real… the emotions feel real. It’s like taking someone into a dream and then putting them into a trance. It makes them more trusting, less suspicious, less on guard. More susceptible to suggestion… a cake walk, essentially.”

The hairs on the back of Arthur’s neck stood up. He didn’t like the sound of it, any of it. And maybe it was because he was old school and maybe it was because he liked to play by certain rules, and maybe it was because the whole plan seemed to hinge on putting Eames in a uniquely vulnerable position. Was there a feedback loop? Would Eames feel whatever the mark felt? Arthur began writing—a list two pages lon—of ways this could go wrong.

When he looked up he caught Eames grinning openly at Smith. Smith smiled back at Eames, closed-lipped, faint. Like maybe he was smart enough not to trust Eames’s enthusiasm so completely.

Arthur produced the dossiers he’d prepared for the job and handed them around—everything that was known on the mark, a timeline, expected project goals. The least sexy part of any job, and he knew it. Eames took it with barely a nod, had the decency to scan the first page while Arthur was standing there, and tossed it onto the table before standing up and going to Smith. Smith had claimed the bedroom for his work station; Arthur had the living room. Arthur settled in and tried not to overhear whatever Smith and Eames were discussing with excited dips and pitches in their voices.

 

Exhaustion set it early. Three chicory coffees deep and it was only eleven, and Arthur was ready to shut his laptop, and his eyes, and crawl under the stiff sheets of his own room two floors down. He rested his elbows on the desk briefly and buried his face in his hands, trying to rub life back into his own old, slack visage.

Someone cleared their throat and Arthur slowly lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder to find Eames sprawled on the divan finally working his way through Arthur’s report. Arthur hadn’t noticed it happen, but somehow they were alone.

“The rest of them went out for dinner a while ago,” Eames said, reading Arthur’s mind.

“And you decided to stay behind?” _With me_ , Arthur didn’t add. It was unlike Eames, frankly, to turn down a free meal, to stay in and study while the world around them was busy offering itself up to the basest, bacchanalian pursuits.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“You could’ve gone. With Smith.”

“I know I could’ve.”

Arthur nodded and ignored the look Eames was giving him. He half turned away, back to his desk, with a stifled yawn.

“I’ve missed this,” Eames said a moment later.

Arthur didn’t know what to say, and stayed turned away. He ran a hand through his hair, rucking it up. It had started to curl and he knew there was nothing for it: humidity would have its way with him and that was that.

“How it’d get to be so long, d’ya reckon?”

“How long since what?” Arthur asked, admitting defeat.

“Since we last saw one another.”

Arthur shrugged, unable to say: _I’ve been avoiding you. I thought if I stayed away, I’d stop feeling like this. Stop feeling anything at all._

“We used to see each quite a lot, I’d say. The best and brightest always seem to flock together,” Eames said.

“Maybe one of us isn’t the best anymore,” Arthur said.

“Well it was good while it lasted, then,” Eames said with a smirk, and Arthur smiled back entirely involuntarily, and he thought, _This, right here, this is why I’ve kept away._

The room was warm and still, and Arthur began to shut down his work. He made notes for tomorrow, began staking his papers, closed his computer.

“Have you ever worked with Grambs?” Eames asked, apropos of nothing.

“Sure, a few times.”

“I was there. I was on that job in Johannesburg.”

“I’d heard he’d been killed. I didn’t realize you were there.”

“Yeah,” Eames said, sounding far away.

“Platt and Tomkins, too.”

“No shit? Both of them?”

“Gunned down outside a hostel in Bangkok,” Arthur said. His shoulders hunched forward, his body making itself slighter, like it might protect him. He’d see it, if he closed his eyes: Platt and Tomkins, one sharp, the other soft; a package deal, beautiful in all the ways that mattered. Arthur had dreamed, once, of having someone, of being like them.

Eames shook his head and said, “I never thought we’d be the ones growing old.”

“37 isn’t old.”

“Feels like it, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you agree to take this job?” Eames asked. He was sitting up straight now, on the very edge of the divan, watching Arthur with a keenness he’d missed. “You haven’t taken a job in months. Why this one? Why’d you say yes?”

Arthur looked at Eames, bewildered. Wasn’t it _obvious?_ Wasn’t it so damn obvious it was ridiculous? After all this time, how could Eames not know it was for him? But Arthur couldn’t say it, wouldn’t say it, if Eames would rather pretend he didn’t understand.

“I know you like a challenge,” Arthur said instead. “Smith seemed to be promising that.”

Eames gave him a another look, long and inscrutable, and it took everything in Arthur not to flinch.

 

Eames disappeared after that, lost to the city for a few days of reconnaissance. The mark was a rotund lawyer with a practice in the CBD, a house in the Garden District, and a pied-à-terre just off Dauphine, and Eames was kept busy bouncing between all three.

Arthur, for his part, stayed hauled up in the hotel, pouring over pinched expense reports and court cases in the public record. Sometimes he strayed to the PJ’s a few blocks over for a coffee, a slice of king cake from the display case. Other times he went out for something stronger, when the Quarter was at its loudest and most forgiving, gone dark and wretched with the smell of beer and piss and worse.

A few times Arthur caught Smith and Eames coming in off the street together, late. Eames would be liquor-loose. He’d beam at Arthur and tell him in ebullient detail about the shrimp and grits he’d just had, or the gumbo, or the pralines. He’d have powdered sugar all down the front of his shirt or his collar would be askew. Smith would smile a brittle smile at Eames. Smith would smile a brutish one at Arthur.

Arthur ignored the bits of him that ached, felt petty, that _wanted_. He wanted to take Eames out, feed him beignets and weak absinthe and strong Hurricanes, wanted to drag him down to Frenchman street and fall back against the wall of a small bar, their bodies close, music sweeping over them both. Arthur, actually, loved New Orleans. Had loved it, a long time ago. He could have loved it again, maybe, with Eames.

They had been like that sometimes, on jobs—stealing away together for an afternoon at a museum or for dinner at a restaurant with an impossible wait list that Eames somehow managed to jump.

But here there was Smith, who never seemed to let Eames very far out of his sight. And here was Eames, who didn’t seem much interested in straying.

 

Arthur was two whiskeys in at the hotel bar one evening when Smith found him, alone, ever so slowly revolving—it wasn’t called the Carousel Bar for nothing. Arthur didn’t know how long Smith had stood there in the doorway, waiting for the Merry-Go-Round to round just enough for Arthur to catch sight of him; or if it’d been luck, if he’d just walked in that moment. Arthur had his doubts.

Smith approached with his hands in his pockets. The stools were all filled but Smith cleared off the woman beside Arthur with a sharp look and took a seat. 

Smith was quiet for a long while, as the bar slowly rotated on its carousel axes. He ordered a beer. It was happy hour and the streets outside were bright and full, and the lights inside were dim, and Arthur thought Smith looked very much like something else here, away from the others. He looked older, smarter, like he actually might know what he was doing—which scared Arthur in a different way, and he couldn’t say why, exactly. He took a long pull of his drink.

“Eames and you go way back, yeah?” Smith asked.

Arthur shrugged. It was better not to give away something that didn’t need to be given away, in this business. Maybe this kid didn’t know that yet, or maybe he was dumb enough to think Arthur was dumb enough to mistake his youth for innocence. But Arthur didn’t say anything, and he never would. Him and Eames—they went back, way back, back further than almost anyone in dreamshare had ever guessed. They'd been young together and learned the consequences together. Learned how life rewarded well-spent and misspent youths alike: by powdering them into so much ash. Before dreamshare, before he was Arthur and Eames was Eames, they’d been given guns and told to march, told it was their responsibility to save each other. And they had. But that was for them to know and remember and never discuss, and so Arthur looked ahead at the mirrored back of the bar, past half-empty bottles of Blue Sapphire and Johnny Walker, and he didn’t say a word.

“He trusts you?” Smith said with something like resignation. Somehow it came off sounding like a threat. “He’s going to need to trust you on this one, Arthur. It’s why I asked him to invite you along.”

Arthur tried not to flinch. So it hadn’t been Eames’s idea, him on this job. Eames hadn’t though, “If I’m going to try something new, I’m going to try it with Arthur by my side.” Because why would he? Arthur knew it was ridiculous, still, to hope, after so many years of watching Eames disappear into hotel rooms with leggy, doe-eyed blondes and delicate boys with sharp jaws. After so many years of stories, from nearly every soul in dreamshare. To still harbor some strange hope that at the end of it all, he’d be there, and Eames would realize it, and they’d be like they’d been at the start—inseparable.

This is of course why Arthur hadn’t taken a job with Eames in over a year, because his thinking went to this more and more, and it was unprofessional. And Arthur hated being thought unprofessional, even if he was the only one thinking it.

“Maybe he trusts me. How should I know? You’d have to ask him.”

“Oh, I have. We’ve talked it through _thoroughly_.”

Arthur cut his eyes over at Smith, who grinned and met his gaze evenly.

“He’s something else, isn’t he?” Smith said, like they were pals.

“He’s the best at what he does,” Arthur said, as a concession. They had another week on the job—he’d curb animosity where he could.

“That he is. That he is,” Smith said, drinking from his beer with a wince. “Forging in general—it’s a fascinating skill, don’t you think? Did you ever want to be a forger?”

“No.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would. Don’t have the imagination for it, I guess. That’s what Eames said. You were the best but you lacked imagination. Well, Arthur, you’re going to have to bear with me and have a little imagination on this one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hope Eames trusts you.”

Arthur’s brain went on alert.

“Your compound… is it safe?”

“How safe is any of what we do?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Let’s just say the compound requires a leap of faith. There are certain aspects of the job Eames won’t be privy to.”

“Why?”

“Because we can’t risk the mark knowing. If Eames knows, there’s a risk the mark will know. So we minimize the risk by keeping Eames in the dark.”

“No. I won’t deceive Eames.”

“It’s not a depiction, Arthur. Eames knows—he knows we’ll have to hold something back. I don’t think he loved the idea, of course, but I told him—if he trusts you, it shouldn’t be a problem. So he relented.”

Arthur knew Eames trusted him, and he trusted Eames. That wasn’t the point.

“What can’t he know?” Arthur asked.

Smith told him. A simple thing. A small thing. And it was everything.

“Absolutely not. No.” Arthur pushed away from the bar with a start, standing up on his suddenly unsteady legs. “I won’t.”

Smith watched him, amused. “You can walk if you want, of course. But that won’t help Eames, if that’s what you’re worried about. Eames wants to be on this job. He’s _intrigued_. And I’m sure you know how he is, when he gets an idea in his head—no pun intended. Like a dog with a bone. He’ll want to see it through, study every facet of it, like some precious rare stone. Will he follow you blindly off the job, do you think? Because if you tell him why you’re leaving, he’ll know what he can’t know, and he won’t be able to do the job anyway—you’ll have stolen this opportunity from him, this challenge. Do you think he’ll resent that, you taking away that choice?”

Arthur knew then that he hated Smith. Arthur knew then that Smith would get himself killed some day. Showmanship did that to a person.

“Eames trusts you because you’re the best in the business. So be the best in the business and don’t let anything happen to him.” Smith finished his beer and stood up. “It’s on him,” he told the bartender, smirking at Arthur. He gave him a pat on the shoulder and headed out of the bar.

Arthur paid because he didn’t know what else to do.

 

The night before the job Arthur knocked on Eames’s door. He didn’t know if Eames was in, but he wanted him to be. He needed him to be. Arthur hadn’t been sleeping—the skin under his eyes was bruised dark with shadows—and he hadn’t seen Eames in days; he had specifically stayed away, kept odd hours, lost himself in his own ministrations.

Arthur had always found distance to be easier. Until it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t, now, here. Arthur knew it would be his last job. He had decided. He didn’t want to do this anymore. Didn’t think he was fit for it anymore, all the standing by. All this watching. Some great unspooling, lives coming undone. He felt out of step with the generation coming up on his heels, too smart and too ruthless and running so quickly toward their own self-destruction and Arthur couldn’t watch that. He wanted something better than destruction.

He wanted, though maybe he hadn’t earned it, something good.

He wanted to see Eames, wanted to stand close to him and memorize how that felt, tattoo it on his bones, stitch it into his muscles like a memory. Eames, who hadn’t yet begun to dull, who had years and years in him yet. Years that it was Arthur’s job to protect.

Arthur might never forgive himself.

He waited a beat, two, and Eames answered in just his boxers, with a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. He smiled around it.

“Arthur!” He extracted the brush and grinned a toothy, toothpaste-y grin. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Can I come in?”

Eames stepped aside and gestured him into the small room, which was strewn about with clothes and cheap souvenirs—a gold, green, and purple stripped shirt much too small for Eames; empty to-go cups; a cheap plastic bead necklace sporting dangling penises.

“Don’t ask what I had to do to get that,” Eames said. Arthur did want to ask, but thought it might involve Smith somehow, and didn’t.

“I’m not sure you could scandalize me, Mr. Eames. I’m done my fair share for beads.”

“Arthur,” Eames said, wide-eyed and fond, after he’d gone into the bathroom to spit and rinse. “Have you been getting up to awfully naughty things on your downtime here? And not inviting me along? I’m hurt.”

“It was in college. I went to school here.”

“Did you really? You never said.” Eames’s face fell a little, shadowed in a way Arthur didn’t understand.

It’d been what he left behind, the boy and the life he let drop away when he joined the Army. When he met Eames. It hadn’t seemed pertinent then, to dwell on it. They were there to be rebuilt as something better, stronger than whatever they’d been before, so why say? Why ever say that he’d been young and stupid once, that he’d thrown up inside the oldest bar in America whilst on a haunted history tour during Orientation, that he’d blacked out and lost his wallet and walked barefoot down Bourbon Street at 3 o’clock in the morning, that he’d stayed up for three days straight finishing his honors thesis and the day before graduation had climbed deliriously into the bead-strewn tree in the academic quad to scream, triumphant, into the night?

Eames watched him, curious. Soft. Like he wished Arthur had said. Like he wished, even now, that Arthur might say, might mix them both a drink and collapse down into a chair and tell him about it, a wry smile tugging at his lips. And then Eames would tell Arthur who he’d been, young and wild and spoiled and dangerous, hurling himself along cobbled London streets, skirting all the wrong places.

That was a dream. Eames probably wished no such thing. Arthur was letting his imagination get away from him (it lacked, _it lacked_ ). It was Arthur that wished, was always wishing, that he could peel back with such care each practiced layer, each purposeful obfuscation of the man he pretended to know, standing before him. He wanted Eames to tell him a story, any story, of who he was.

Eames, probably, had never told Arthur a true thing about himself. Why would he start tonight?

Why hadn’t Arthur ever asked?

Too late, too late.

Eames had grown too precious to him. It was dangerous now.

Arthur saw then, laid bare on the coffee table beside a bookstore-fresh copy of _East of Eden_ , Eames’s poker chip, patterned white and red, nicked just so, typo’d in the wrong (right) places.

“Anyway, you’ve been busy with Smith, so.”

Eames made a thoughtful noise and turned away, briefly. It was too easy. The work of an instant. Arthur snatched up Eames’s totem.

Arthur hated himself for doing it, for knowing, without permission, the sudden weight of it, how the ridges felt against his fingertips when he pocketed it. Arthur was struck, then, by the singular tragedy of knowing someone else’s totem. He remembered Dom, the morning after Mal jumped, sitting at the dinning room table, fingering her top with a far-off look in his eye, his face gone slack. It was wrong. It went against everything they’d taught themselves in order to survive.

But Eames could trust Arthur, right? Smith’s voice rang obnoxiously in his ears, even now. _Trust_.

Arthur hadn’t said so much to Smith—he was young, he’d learn—but trust was an empty word. A dangerous, hollow word. Trust had never spared a single life, in Arthur’s experience.

Trust had destroyed plenty.

“Smith. He’s a very… curious. Wants to know a lot about lot,” Eames said, scratching the back of his head, turning again to meet Arthur’s blank expression.

“That can go either way.”

“Do you have a preference?”

Arthur shrugged. “Let life deal with him as it may. I have no interest in working with him again.” The poker chip in his pocket, hitting up against Arthur’s die whenever he shifted, burned. Arthur wouldn’t forgive Smith his risks, his brilliance or his stupidity.

Eames seemed surprised at the sharpness in Arthur’s voice. He raised his eyebrows high. By his professional nature, Arthur’s wont had always been never to speak ill of his extractors. Outward shows of loyalty until the job was done. Arthur’s face flushed and he looked away.

“Arthur…”

“It’s fine, Eames. I know it wasn’t your idea in the first place, me being here. We’re professionals, you and I. Just… be careful tomorrow,” Arthur said, haltingly. It came out half-pained and too desperate, but he hadn’t been able to shake the suffocating press of fear that choked at him whenever he tried to sleep. He looked at Eames, unguarded and lovely, who’d gotten more beautiful the older he got, who had retained his child-like enthusiasm for what they did, for what was possible, and Arthur envied him, and yes he loved him, and the thought of something happening to Eames was driving Arthur to the very brink. He couldn’t shake it, couldn’t stop thinking Mal and the specter-like version of Dom she’d left in her wake.

“Arthur, is everything okay?” He paused, then amended, “With the job, I mean?”

“You can trust me, Eames.”

“I know. It’s not you I’m worried about, frankly.”

“You’ll be fine.” Arthur had one hand on the door, poised to leave.

“Darling,” Eames said, his voice gone soft. Arthur’s gaze snapped up to meet Eames’s and he was thrown, perplexed, by the gentleness he saw there. The delicate—dare he think it?—fondness glinting in the blue-green of Eames’s familiar, forever distant eyes. “I’m glad you took the job. I would’ve have agreed to it if you hadn’t.”

Arthur flinched. “Goodnight, Mr. Eames.”

 

The job was scheduled to take no time at all. They’d paid off the mark’s secretary early on; she would drop a sleeping pill in his morning (decaf) coffee and the team would steal into his office just past noon to find him passed out at his desk. The architect had gotten inside and surveyed the space the week before in order to create a perfect mimicry the first level down. Reality—or something quite like it—in situ.

In the dream they would play at being clients, Smith and Eames. Isaac was the dreamer, and he and Arthur would stay just on the other side of the door, an unnecessarily watch—Arthur had checked and double-checked his records; no militarization training. Sylvie had stayed topside to watch over them all.

Smith was the wordsmith and Eames the forger; Smith would spin a tale to the mark—a case that, the mark would think, oddly resembled his own predicament—and Eames would play on the feelings the story elicited in the mark, manipulating and strengthening them, guiding them just so. Eames would think the thought first—the logical conclusion to such feelings—and feed it to the mark sympathetically. As Eames was already aware, a thought, once planted, must be fertilized with emotion to survive.

Eames would forge sleepiness then, passing it along to the mark, and he and Smith would step out of the office while the mark was overcome with the need to lay down for a moment and nap.

The second level, Smith had told Eames, was a sort of insurance policy. They would repeat the game, feed the idea to the mark again, to ensure it really stuck. This time Eames and Arthur would go down the with mark on their own—they had the most experience with the increasing instability of dreams-within-dreams.

Smith hadn’t told Eames what the second level would be, and Eames assumed this was what he was being kept in the dark about, and he’d been professional enough not to ask why. Arthur would be the dreamer, and Eames trusted Arthur.

This is what Eames was actually being kept in the dark about:

There was no second level.

When Smith explained it to Arthur that night in the bar, he explained it like this: what went wrong when teams tried to incept their marks was that they went too deep. They tried to bury an idea so far into a mark’s subconscious the mark couldn’t trace its genesis. But people don’t much care about the genesis of their ideas, not really. Humanity has a special fondness for the idea (no pun intended) of epiphanies, of divine inspiration.

“Maybe they think it speaks to some innate genius in themselves,” Smith said, with a shrug and a cruel twist to his mouth.

The key to manufacturing that feeling? Shallow dreams. The opposite of what everyone assumed. Like a dream you have after you’ve woken up and fallen back asleep, the ones you skirt the surface of for 20 minutes, maybe. Those are the ones that feel the most real. They’re what stay with you, affect your day, change your thinking.

This second going under was a fake-left, a diversion. A rudimentary tactic, frankly—Arthur’d done the same thing to Saito, years ago. A dream within a dream, so that when the mark woke back up into the first level, he’d be convinced he was awake. The idea would feel real, would seep in.

But Smith’s compound made dreams too delicate to support two levels. The connection between Eames and the mark was too tenuous, could dissolve in another dream. So while Smith pulled out the PASIV and readied them, only Eames and the mark were dropped. Arthur held the needle against his wrist, mockingly. Without a dreamer the other two would drop into a momentary, dreamless sleep. White, unconstructed space.

It would only be for a minute, Smith had said, just long enough to give the mark the sensation of waking, without the demand of constructing and stabilizing a second level. And Eames couldn’t know because Eames needed to feel—needed to make the mark feel—that he was waking peacefully from a dreamless sleep. If Arthur wasn’t entirely convinced, he couldn’t see the harm, either, and he followed orders like a good Point Man (he had learned, too well, to ignore flaws in his extractors). Smith knew how the compound worked, after all, knew its limitations; Arthur didn’t.

If Smith seemed agitated while he was unspooling the lines, if he was checking his watch more than Arthur felt was necessary, Arthur didn’t think anything of it. He was distracted. He’d been watching Eames school his face. Arthur could see how it unnerved Eames, the prospect of dropping into a dream unprepared, and Arthur could hardly blame him. Arthur touched Eames’s wrist gently, just above where the needle had punctured his skin, and Eames looked over at him. Arthur smiled, small and wanting, hoping to reassure Eames. The other man matched the gesture and gave him a small nod.

Arthur wouldn’t know if it would’ve worked, because this is where it all went wrong.

Smith pressed the plunger and Eames’s eyes shut, and just as quickly the dream began to shudder. The windows shook in their panes. Arthur exchanged a look with Smith.

“Is that meant to happen?”

Smith looked at Arthur, nervous. Something was wrong.

“I’ll check it out,” Smith said, fumbling a gun out of his back pocket. He stared it for a long moment, as though unfamiliar with the act, before he tentatively stuck it in his mouth and discharged it. His body crumbled and the dream shook again, grumbled and groaned.

Arthur had the thought he should check on Isaac, still at his post on the other side of the office door, when the ground fell away and Arthur jerked awake on the office floor, topside.

Something was definitely, decidedly wrong.

Smith was nowhere to be seen; neither was Isaac. Their lines laid limp on the floor, haphazardly tossed aside, the needles still bloody. Arthur felt groggy and disoriented, his system too full of somnacin; the timer hadn’t run down fully on the dream and he had too much of the stuff left in his veins—he felt heavy and slow. Arthur looked over at Eames and saw him blinking awake, his eyes the same kind of glassy. The mark was still out, the sedative doing its work on him.

“Everything alright?” Eames asked, his voice rough. He pulled out his line and tired to stand, shaky on his feet.

Eames didn’t know, Arthur thought. He couldn’t know that anything was wrong—his ignorance was his bliss. He thought they were still dreaming.

“Oh shite, he’s militarized?” Eames muttered, his eyes focusing—trying to focus—on something across the room.

Adrenaline flushed the somnacin from Arthur’s blood and he turned, scrambling to his feet. A man—dirty jeans, Saints t-shirt—stood in the doorway, a silenced gun dangling in one hand.

Arthur knew, then, where Smith had gone.

Arthur know why Smith had been so interested in Eames: because Eames was brilliant at what he did. Too brilliant. There would never be a forger who could compete, not while Eames was alive.

It’d all been for Eames, the whole job. A set-up. The man raised his gun.

Arthur stepped in front of Eames, just two swift steps, his back to the door. Arthur stood in front of the man who’d known for so very long, straightened Eames’s collar with trembling fingers and kept his eyes on Eames’s throat, watched his Adam’s apple bob, his throat constrict with breath, with life. Eames was watching Arthur’s hands play over the seams of his horrible shirt, his brow furrowed, when Arthur grunted and collapsed against his front. The smell of gunpowder and copper, guts wrenched open from inside.

With Arthur suddenly pressed against him, a warm, heavy weight, Eames felt the reverberation of the second bullet, and the third, that sunk into Arthur’s back in quick succession, lodging deep in muscle and bone. The gun jammed then, or the man spooked and fled. The room went quiet.

“How the hell was a guy like this militarized?” Eames said, not sounding particularly bothered. His voice betrayed only the disappointment of a promising job gone to shit. His fingers gripped Arthur’s shoulders and pushed, trying to put a few inches between their bodies. Arthur’s legs went out from under him immediately and he sunk to his knees like a sad marionette with cut strings.

Arthur made an ugly noise when he hit the floor, something muted and guttural.

Eames let out a small growl of frustration, turning away from Arthur’s collapsed form. “Not that I don’t love it when you play white knight to my damsel in distress, darling,” he said, distracted. He started to pace the empty room.

Arthur focused on the carpet and his own breathing, hard inhales and wet exhales. It hurt. He knew, theoretically, it must hurt, that he’d been torn open and the hidden parts of him exposed now to the world, but he couldn’t _feel it._ Not exactly. His mind was foggy.

_Eames didn’t know._

“So the job’s bust? Everyone else has already gone up? Nice of you to wait behind for me,” he muttered, sitting down heavily on the small couch, jostling the mark.

Being shot hurt so much more, in reality.

Arthur began to cough, splattering the white carpet with a spray of red.

“Right,” Eames said, resigned. He withdrew his own gun from inside his jacket and pressed it against the back of Arthur’s head.

Arthur startled and found the strength to scramble away, knocking Eames’s gun away. “Jesus, Eames. Please.”

“I was just going to put you out of your misery, darling. The job’s obviously gone to shite. But hey, if you want to bleed out slowly, that’s your choice. I’m going to see what’s up, though.” He raised the gun to his own template.

“Eames!” Arthur tried to lunge, but ended up a sad pile at Eames’s feet.

“Jesus, Arthur.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?” Eames asked slowly, his voice catching.

“Just… don’t.” Arthur raised his head and looked up at Eames, who was watching him with a peculiar, clearing look. Always so beautiful, Arthur though blearily. How unfair. He wanted to be angry, so very angry. He was still young. There was things he hadn’t said, not really. Too many things he’d hoped Eames would just _know_ , but how stupid, to rely on that. He should have said. He should have told him so much.

Arthur reached into his own pocket and withdrew the poker chip. “I kept it from you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Eames’s eyes went wide, realization dawning. Horror and disgust and shock. Finally disbelief. He fell forward to kneel beside Arthur’s crumbled body, afraid to touch. Arthur reached out and held the poker chip toward Eames, slippery and wet with blood.

“What have you done?” Eames said, his voice hoarse. His eyes flickered from Arthur’s face to the lost totem lying stained in Arthur’s palm; it was as though Eames was afraid to truly touch it, weight it, know it. Afraid to admit this was reality.

“There was no second level.”

 

Eames called Dom Cobb, because he thought he should call someone. He didn’t know if Arthur had family somewhere waiting for him, and if Dom knew one way or the other, he didn’t say on the phone. What he did say, his voice slow and unsteady, was, “I’ve just got to sort out a sitter. I’ll be there in the morning.”

Arthur’s body would wait, cold and unidentified, in the Orleans Parish morgue.

Eames went back to the hotel, found the suite swept. He took a hot shower, put on a clean pair of trousers and a Pat O’Brien’s novelty t-shirt, and fell into bed. He shouldn’t have been able to sleep, maybe, but somehow he did, heavy and dreamless.

Eames left the hotel the next morning in the same clothes, teeth unbrushed, with nothing to his name but a wallet he’d lifted on Canal Street. It was early and the streetcar was still running—parades wouldn’t start rolling Uptown for hours yet. Up St. Charles Avenue, slow and clanging, picking up middle-aged tourists and bedraggled, hungover youths. Eames followed the latter off the streetcar outside the university, kept a few feet behind them as they shuffled through the quad, throwing their cheapest beads into a single, leafless tree.

Eames watched them, tried to see Arthur in them, uncoordinated and aimless, optimistic, bright. Eames had known the tail end of that kid, had seen what might have been there get beat out of him and ground into the mud, and Eames hadn’t thought to mourn the loss until now. What Arthur might’ve been, if he hadn’t become what he had.

It’d been a lifetime ago, that; their bodies torn apart and remade stronger, their minds torn apart and remade…

A lifetime ago, but it’d passed in a blink of an eye. Too soon.

They were supposed to have time, him and Arthur. They were supposed to have _so much time_ to figure it out. Eames had never thought, not for a single second, that they wouldn’t eventually figure it out. It’d made him careless, that certainty.

Dom found him under the bead tree, helped him up, walked him to a cafe and bought him a weak tea and a bagel.

“I called his sister this morning,” Dom said. “She’s coming down. She’ll identify the body and handle all the arrangements.”

“What’s her name?”

“Alicia Thomas. He was Matthew Thomas before he joined the army.”

Eames nodded, tried not to care that he hadn’t know. He asked, “Did he tell you where he got Arthur from?”

Dom looked past Eames, squinting into the too-bright morning, across the dewy grass, remembering. He nodded after a moment, a small smile finding room on his lips. “Said he wanted to be a knight, when he was a kid.”

Eames was quiet. It was a warm morning, but his fingers felt cold and dumb, and he warmed them around his cardboard cup. 

“I don’t know if it’s fair of me to say,” Dom began, looking back at Eames. His face grew pinched, considering. “He. Arthur”—Dom took a deep breath, tried again—“Probably you knew but in case you didn’t, I know he always wanted to say—Eames. Arthur… he loved you.”

Dom’s faced crumbled and he looked away, one hand over his eyes. Noiselessly he gathered himself. Eames hadn’t understood the relationship between Arthur and Dom exactly—it hadn’t been his place to ask—but he’d seen fathers bury their children before, and he couldn’t help but be reminded now of the terrible, haunted look on their faces as they did so.

“Did you know?” Dom asked after a long moment.

Eames didn’t know, not in so many words. His stomach churned over, sloshing black tea and bile until he thought he was going to be sick. He hated that he had never said to Arthur—

And now he never would.

But Dom was watching him, hopeful, somehow, even in his grief.

“Yeah,” Eames said, his voice breaking. He coughed. “I knew. We—him and I, we—I loved him too. He knew.”

A lie, but it lifted something from Dom’s shoulders.

It was a kindness to the living, to believe the dead could know.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was exhausted and run down and feeling dgbisdnsdlagnsdpob on account of work a few weeks ago, and I listened to "A Little Fall of Rain" from Les Miz literally for 2.5 hours on repeat, and the idea for this fic happened. I think the influence is quite obvious. I'M SORRY OKAY?


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